Main menu

Tag Archives: Flash

Today, Tintri announced the Tintri VMstore T5000 All-Flash series—the world’s first all-flash storage system that lets you work at the VM level—leading a launch that includes Tintri OS 4.0, Tintri Global Center 2.1 and VMstack, Tintri’s partner-led converged stack. Since its inception in 2008, Tintri has delivered differentiated and innovative features and products for next-generation virtualized datacenters. And we’re continuing the trend with the game-changing All-Flash VM-Aware Storage (VAS).

Other all-flash vendors claim all-flash can be a solution for all workloads—a case of “if all you have is a hammer then everything looks like a nail.” Or, they’ll argue that all-flash can augment hybrid deployments, with the ability to pin or move entire LUNs and volumes.

But not all workloads in a LUN or volume may have the same needs for flash, performance and latency. So just as we’ve reinvented storage over the past four years, Tintri’s ready to reinvent all-flash. Here’s how:

No LUNs. Continuing the Tintri tradition, the T5000 series eliminates LUNs and volumes, letting you focus on applications. We’re welcoming VMs to the all-flash space across multiple hypervisors.

Unified management. Aside from standalone installations, the T5000 series can also augment the T800, and vice-versa. Admins can now manage VMs across hybrid-flash and all-flash platforms in a single pool through Tintri Global Center (TGC), with full integration.

Fully automated policy-based infrastructure through TGC, with support from vDisk-granular analytics and VM-granular self-managed service groups.

With access to vDisk-granular historical performance data, SLAs and detailed latency information, customers can decide which workloads can benefit from all-flash vs hybrid-flash—especially when our hybrid-flash delivers 99-100% from flash.

But we hear you, storage admins: you want to go into the weeds. Surprise—we’re happy to help. Here’s what else the T5000 series can offer you:

Yesterday we announced a significant milestone of 200,000 VMs deployed on Tintri with close to 16PB addressed by these VMs.

Now, these numbers may not look big on their own, but they become really interesting when you combine it with the fact we have doubled the number of VMs in last 6 months and that capacity numbers are for VMs experiencing sub-ms performance. All of this has come at the cost of incumbent storage providers where Tintri beat Modern & Traditional Storage Vendors in process.

Tintri brought a revolutionary Storage platform in 2011 designed for Flash just to run VMs and vDisks. The idea was to have a storage platform that was designed with Virtualization in mind and not Physical Workloads. To date, Tintri VMstore is the only external, best-of-breed platform that has laser focus on Virtualization. The General Purpose Platforms (Traditional & Modern, Flash & Hybrid) continue to focus on Physical workloads even as the customers are moving towards 100% virtualization.

Where Tintri continues to have edge across multiple Hypervisors is the vDisk level visibility of workloads as compared to General Purpose Platforms that have no idea about what happens at the Hypervisor layer.

One of the drawbacks of this is the IO blender effect that everyone talks about with no effort to provide any solution except throwing flash at it. Tintri is the only platform that addresses it, delivering high performance, sub-ms response times, vDisk granular isolation, predictability, analytics across the infrastructure and per VM data services.

VMware VVOLs is the step in the right direction but it is just an enabler for one hypervisor and it’ll depend upon a vendor on what functionalities it brings to the storage platforms. With all our experience in managing and understanding VMs, Tintri is committed to bring all the goodness that the customers have experienced on the VMstore and much more to VVOLs. And only Tintri would be able to provide customers a choice of deploying VMs either with VVOLs or with an open implementation like NFS without compromising on functionality.

How will we maintain this growth, as the base gets bigger?

Tintri has a solid roadmap. Our focus on Virtualization allows us to bring better functionality around Virtualization & Cloud, much faster to the market. We don’t have to try to be good for all workloads as other General Purpose Platforms and in process compromise everywhere. We are the best Storage Platform for Virtualization & Cloud and would continue to be so for a long time.

If you want to experience all-flash performance for all your virtualized applications (not just the critical ones) at 1/4th of the cost of an over-provisioned flash array (through over-sold dedup and compression) with all the analytics, auto-tuning, VM granular goodness and isolation that our customers are experiencing, I would encourage you to contact your Tintri Rep or your preferred partner. If you plan to attend VMworld, we are going to have big presence there. You can book a Private meeting with Tintri or attend one of our sessions. See details here.

This comes up a lot in my conversations with Customers, Prospects and Partners. Delivering 99% of the IO from Flash is one of the biggest differentiators for Tintri that allows us to maximize the value of Flash, delivering sub millisecond latencies to workloads.

One of the toughest jobs for any product that has both spinning disks and Flash is to keep the Flash filled with meaningful data in order to maximize the IO from Flash. This is something that the engineering teams really struggle with, resulting in products that deliver less than 50% IO from Flash in real life situations.

Yes, we have been waiting for it for a long time now and we are still unsure about its whereabouts.

For those of you who want to understand why there is a need for VM awareness, there are a lot of blogs on this topic by some of the best in the industry. Stephen Foskett covered it in three parts – Part1, Part2, Part 3. Tintri has a great infographic explaining it on a page here and in a blog post here .

VVols is bringing in a new type of model which basically helps one define policies and data services at a VM level, getting granular than the current model used by traditional storage devices, which is at a Volume/LUN level and at the same time preventing the IO Blender situation to an extent.

In my opinion, adding VVols to vSphere is a great step by VMware but it is definitely only a small part of the solution. In fact, I think it is just an enabler and there is a lot that is needed at the underlying storage level to make it an ideal VM aware storage. Let’s dig more into this.

Yes, I have taken the plunge and I am on to a new challenge. I had a great ride at NetApp and I will cherish every moment I spent there, learning a lot which helped me grow both personally and professionally.

I think it is important to take on new challenges and adapt to changes because nothing ever stays the same, which means unless you can adapt and change too, you will be stuck doing the same things, which could then make your life a lot harder than it needs to be.

Like this:

Flash has changed the way the Storage is Architected in the Datacenter. The fear of using higher capacity drives for high performance applications is the thing of the past. I remember having conversations with customers up for tech refresh and their concern around refreshing the hard drives supporting their applications. The use of Flash in different forms has taken care of those concerns. What we are striving for now is use of just two tiers in the datacenter – Flash (or equivalent) and SATA